SLeverburgh (An t-Ob)

Leverburgh from
the South East

The village of Leverburgh was originally known as
An t-Ob, or its Anglicised equivalent of "Obbe". It
was changed to Leverburgh in 1921 with the breaking of the first of two waves
of change that were to sweep over the village in the 1900s. The name An t-Ob
means "the creek" and at the end of the 1800s the settlement here had a weekly
steamer to Glasgow and an inn,
and supported a small fishing community.

In 1918 Lord Leverhume, founder of the multinational company
Unilever, purchased the whole of Lewis and
Harris. An t-Ob was part of the Earl of
Dunmore's South Harris estate, which
Lord Leverhume brought for
£36,000. Over the following five years he set to work to transform the
economy of Lewis in particular, spending the better part of a million pounds in
the process. In 1923 he gave up his plans for
Lewis, deciding instead to
concentrate on Harris.

An t-Ob, renamed Leverburgh in 1921, was to be the centre of an
economic empire founded on fish. Lord Leverhume built and equipped fishing
boats and set up a processing plant at Leverburgh including fish smoking and
refrigeration facilities, warehousing and accommodation. The idea was to use
aircraft to spot shoals of herring, which the fishing boats would then catch
and return to Leverburgh for processing. These would supply a 400 strong chain
of retail fish shops, called MacFisheries, that
Lord Leverhume proposed to
set up throughout the UK.

Lord Leverhume
died of pneumonia after a trip to Africa in May 1925. £250,000 had been
spent on new works and facilities in Leverburgh, but
Leverhume's dream died with
him, and the plant at Leverburgh was sold for just £5,000 to a demolition
company. The vast South Harris estate, purchased in 1918 for £36,000, was
sold for just £900.

Today, all that remains of
Lord Leverhume's investment
are some of the village houses, the Leverhume Memorial School, and the name of
the village: and the last of these is gradually shifting back to the original
An t-Ob as the move to reintroduce original
Gaelic names across the
Western Isles gathers momentum.

The result by the mid 1990s was described by Hamish Haswell-Smith
in the first edition of The Scottish Islands as
"a small, sad, rather down-at-heel port". Things started to change for
the better in June 1996 when a second wave of change broke over the village.

What happened exceeded even the most optimistic of projections, and
the Sound of Harris Ferry has been a runaway
success. So much so that in 2003 a new, much larger (and quieter), vessel, the
MV Loch Portain, took over the service. The impact on Leverburgh has been
dramatic and positive. New facilities and services have opened up and it has
even been necessary to build a new road to allow ferry traffic to bypass the
higher parts of the village.

The result is that Leverburgh is enjoying a sense of optimism it hasn't experienced since the two short
years from 1923 to 1925. Only this time it is based on something a little more
substantial than one man's dream.